Abstract
On 16 November 1795 a crowd numbering perhaps 30,000 gathered in New Palace Yard for a meeting of Westminster electors, organized by Charles James Fox to rally the borough against proposed legislation whose intent was to restrict public meetings. Fox, angered by ‘the most daring attack made on the Constitution since the Revolution’, was, nevertheless, fearful about ‘all the calumny that will be thrown upon us on account of the countenance which we shall be represented as giving to the Corresponding Society and others, who are supposed to wish the overthrow of the Monarchy’. He worried as well that since the government had recruited his opponents to attend the meeting there might be a riot.1 The government feared Fox legitimizing an alternative to parliament—a mass platform in the very heart of the body politic—as Wilkes had done three decades earlier. The king therefore urged his leading ministers to keep the avenues near parliament clear by using the military. Portland, the Home Secretary and Lord Chancellor Loughborough agreed to have sufficient constables and soldiers to enforce order and to prevent Fox employing Westminster Hall.2
It seems strange to hear that English women are afraid of mingling in crowds and public places.
Maria Grey, Is the Exercise of the Suffrage Unfeminine? (1870)
We shape our buildings, and afterwards our buildings shape us.
Winston Churchill (1943)
A whole history remains to be written of spaces.
Michel Foucault, ‘The Eye of Power’ (1977)
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Notes
Memorials and Correspondence of Charles James Fox, ed. Lord J. Russell (1853–7), iii. 124–6; Morning Chronicle, 16–17 Nov. 1795;
F. O’Gorman, The Whig Party and the French Revolution (1967), 213;
L. G. Mitchell, Charles James Fox (1992), 143.
Later Correspondence of George III, ed. A. Aspinall (Cambridge, 1963), ii. 421–2, 424–5; The Times, 17 Nov. 1795.
Diary of Joseph Farington, ed. K. Garlick et al. (1978–84), ii. 403–6; Later Correspondence of George III, ii. 425–6.
Account of the Proceeding of a Meeting of the Inhabitants of Westminster, in Palace-Yard, November 26 [sic], 1795 (1795), 9; Diary and Correspondence of Charles Abbot, Lord Colchester, ed. Lord Colchester (1861), i. 7.
H. Jephson, The Platform; Its Rise and Progress (1892), ii. 466–7.
Parliamentary History 32 (1795), 357–8; J. Mori, William Pitt and the French Revolution, 1785–1795 (New York, 1997), 252–3.
C. T. Goodsell, The Social Meaning of Civic Space: Studying Political Authority through Architecture (Lawrence, 1988), 10–14, quotation at 10;
N. Pevsner and S. Bradley, London. 6, Westminster (New Haven, 2003), 46.
For fairs and theatres functioning as alternative political spaces see M. Judd, ‘“The Oddest Combination of Town and Country”; Popular Culture and the London Fairs’, in J. K. Walton and James Walvin (eds.), Leisure in Britain, 1780–1939 (Manchester, 1983), 10–30;
J. Butwin, ‘Democracy and Popular Culture Before Reform’, Browning Institute Studies 17 (1989), 3;
M. Baer, Theatre and Disorder in Late Georgian London (Oxford, 1992), ch. 8. Wordsworth termed parliament ‘that great stage where senators, tongue-favoured men, perform’: The Prelude, ed. E. de Selincourt (1805; Oxford, 1959), 249.
Proceedings of the electors of the city and liberties of Westminster (1810); St. James’s Chronicle, 11 May 1837; Dyott’s Diary, ed. R. W. Jeffery (1907), ii. 74.
G. C. Williamson, Curious Survivals (1925), 106–8.
J. Diprose, Some Account of the Parish of St. Clement Danes (1869), ii. 136; Westminster and Lambeth Gazette, 14 Nov. and Pall Mall Gazette, 26 Nov. 1885;
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Letters and Journals of Lady Mary Coke, ed. J. A. Home (Edinburgh, 1889–96), ii. 226; The Times, 24 August 1842.
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A. Clark, Scandal: The Sexual Politics of the British Constitution (Princeton, 2004), ch. 3.
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The story first appeared in the anti-Foxite Morning Post, and may have been apocryphal: HWE, 228 and n. 345; Georgiana: Extracts from the Correspondence of Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, ed. Earl of Bessborough (1955), 79.
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H. Alken, A Panorama of the Progress of Human Life (1820; 1948), opp. 36;
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Baer, M. (2012). Spaces: Civic, Public, Private and Social. In: The Rise and Fall of Radical Westminster, 1780–1890. Studies in Modern History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137035295_6
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